Topic: Terence Mckenna, Timewave Zero, and 2012
Selections from a discussion between Terence McKenna and Art Bell on the Coast to Coast radio program in May 1997.
TM: Well, in looking at this, I created a vocabulary - actually I borrowed it from Alfred North Whitehead - but I think I'm on to something which science has missed, and it's this; it's that the universe, or human life or an empire or an ecosystem, any large scale or small scale process, can be looked at as a dynamic struggle between two qualities which I call habit and novelty. And I think they're pretty self-explanatory. Habit is simply repetition of established patterns, conservation, holding back what has already been achieved into a system, and novelty is the chance-taking, the exploratory, the new, the never-before-seen. And these two qualities – habit and novelty – are locked in all situations in a kind of struggle.
AB: Is it a linear process or is it an exponentially acceleration process?
TM: It's an exponentially accelerating process which leads to a kind of end-of-the-world scenario which has led a lot of people to place me out with the squirrels because I'm saying that this process of novelty is now moving so quickly that within our own lifetimes it is going to accelerate essentially to such an intensity that we will be experiencing more novelty in a few weeks or days than we've previously experienced in the whole life of the cosmos.
AB: You have described precisely what I have just written about. I wrote a book called the Quickening.
TM: Someone showed me your book and I said yes, this guy is onto this.
AB: I'm on to it I guess in a more pedestrian perspective than yourself after listening to your first half hour, but we're talking about exactly, precisely the same thing. I've been this talk radio thing for about 13 years, you know, that all-night show, and I am a trained observer of events and people, and every night I've had to watch the news and dissect what's going on in our world to prepare for this program. And in that 13 years, unmistakably socially, politically, environmentally, you name it, in every one of those areas of human endeavor, things are beginning to accelerate. There is simply no question about it, and that sounds exactly to be the same thing you're proposing here.
TM: Yes, where I've gone further than most people is, a lot of people have noticed the "time is speeding up" phenomena, but they tend to give credit to science or media or something like that. What' I'm saying is that this is built into the laws of physics.
AB: Are you able to discern any time-lines to timewave zero?
TM: Yes, we've been talking about this as a metaphor ... what makes me, I hope, a little different from some of the other prophets in the marketplace is, I've got a formal mathematical theory that ... you know, I mentioned habit and novelty, this dualistic flow ... well, because it is a dualistic flow, it can be portrayed like the ebb and flow of the price of a stock, or something like that, in other words, it can be portrayed as a line graph. So I've written computer programs which produce what I call novelty waves ... in other words, a time-scale wave that pictures the ebb and flow of novelty. And by fitting known historical and paleontological and geological data into these waves at different scales, I was finally able to discern a best fit. But the conclusion that it led to was very startling to me, which is: this ultimate novelty, this transcendental object at the end of time, isn't millennia in the future, it is in fact slated to collide with historical necessity some time in late 2012.
Now, I know you have some interest in the Mayan calendar. I didn't know when I calculated this date that it was the same end date as the Mayan calendar - to the day.
AB: Let me ask you this. What did you input to your data base for this computer program? In other words, what did you start with?
TM: Well I had a very academic interest in the I Ching, which is the Chinese method of divination, and everyone who's looked at this thing has been struck by the fact that it seems to work, so I carried out a mathematical analysis.
AB: I don't know what I Ching is, and I know a lot of other people don't either. What is it?
TM: Well, it's existed for thousands of years in China. It's sometimes done by throwing stalks, or sometimes done with coins, but it's a method of producing a thing called a hexagram which made up of either broken or unbroken lines – six on top of each other – so if you're a mathematician you can figure, if it's made up of broken and unbroken lines and there are six of them on top of each other there must be a possibility of 64 of these things. And thousands of years ago in China there was a vast body of literary commentary built up around these hexagrams, and they have always been presented in a traditional order, a certain way that they are always presented. And I was studying a very academic question, which was, is this order of these hexagrams a true order, in other words, governed by rules, or is it simply a random jumble sanctioned by tradition?
And this very obscure academic question led ultimately to the discovery that the I Ching was a 384-day, thirteen lunar cycle calendar. And then from there I realized that this 384-day calendar was actually a subset in a fractal time-keeping scheme that is really more accurate and more sophisticated than anything in the west. So what I'm really suggesting here is that in the same way that the west conquered the nature of matter through the elaboration of modern science, about 4000 years ago in China a deeper analysis of time was carried out than has ever been undertaken in the west, and that the mathematics of this thing became buried then in this fortune-telling system.
The interesting thing, Art, is that with a wave like that, you can do what's called retrodicting. In other words, if you have a wave of novelty that describes the past, you have to correctly predict the Italian renaissance, the Greek enlightenment, the modernity of the 20th century, so by predicting the past, we've gained confidence that this wave predicts the future.
AB: That sounds quite scientific, in other words, science is repeatability, and if your can repeatedly demonstrate that you can mathematically show the events of the past, then yes I would imagine that you can project.
TM: Well, so I've been active since 1975, but the theory is in a sense very conservative. It never says what will happen, it says when interesting things are highly likely, and when you're just wasting your time.
AB: When you project toward 2012, what is the magnitude of the spike or the difference there? Can give us an idea of the magnitudes along the way?
TM: There is only one point in the entire cycle where the level of habit drops to zero; effectively then novelty becomes infinite. And at that point occurs on this solstice date in 2012. Now it's very interesting ... there are some people on the net called singularists, and they're hard-headed engineering types, and they take rates of energy release and rates of data storage, this sort of thing, and draw all their curves out, and they can see that some time between 2008 and 2020 everything - we produce infinite amounts of energy ... we pack infinite amounts of data into infinitely small spaces, in other words, the same sort of things where, because of the acceleration built into the unfolding of this novelty process, we're going to cross more territory between here and 2012 than we have crossed between the Big Bang and getting to here.
It kind of explains what is happening, that it isn't the old-style religion, that it isn't the sterile steady-state of science, it's that the universe is actually evolving some kind of process of self-metamorphosis, and human beings indicate that we have crossed some boundary into some new era, a new epoch of ever greater acceleration into this process of self-revelation. This is what religions are raving about, this is what every prophet on the street corner is trying to articulate, and I think it's real. I think we're getting a lot of static because people can only deal with it through images that they know. You know, Marshall McLuhan said we drive into the future using only our rear view mirror, and that's sort of what it is. But I call this thing the transcendental object at the end of time, and I think in a sense, religion, Christian revelation, it will all be fulfilled in a way none of us ever suspected, because nature has this appetite for novelty and acceleration into novelty.
AB: So then again I ask, at this moment that we speak of 2012, what do you actually think will occur?
TM: Well, I've thought about this a good deal, and there are hard and soft scenarios, but I've noticed that what the Timewave seems most coherently able to track is technology. Somehow technology is very important, it's the transformation of the human relationship to the world through tools. And so what I'm thinking would fulfill this entire scenario without requiring God Almighty to put in an appearance is time travel. I think that we are moving toward, you know if you look at biology over huge scales of time -hundreds of millions of years - it is a kind of conquest of dimensionality.
TM: I think there's been ebb and flow of novelty within the 20th century, parts of it more novel than others. But I think to argue that it isn't among the most novel periods of time is a pretty uphill battle.
AB: You put together a computer program which was able to trace the ebb and the flow of this novelty and in effect chart major events in history. How many, if I might ask, hits and misses ... were there any misses in the model, or did you hit each, major moment on history on the nose?
TM: Well, by my understanding of this theory, there can be no misses. In other words, it's not a statistical theory, we're not okay if we're right two-thirds of the time, so we have to be right all of the time.
AB: So you're telling me you are.
TM:: I submit to you and to the world for your examination and critiquing the fact that yes, the Timewave with it's end point December 21, 2012, describes with as great an accuracy as I am able to discern the actual vicissitudes of novelty and habit in history and natural history. That's the claim.
